View Jon Cooper’s original link building strategies post with the new filtering Alex Czartoryski of Fresh Air Educators (an outdoor ed site) put together from our the spreadsheet.

Who says SEO is dead? I’m pretty impressed with the collaboration and transparency of not just Jon, Alex, and Outspoken Media, but everyone Jon mentions in those link strategies. Hey SEO industry, you should be proud of yourselves!

Transcript from the video:

Hi guys, this is Rhea Drysdale, the CEO at Outspoken Media and I wanted to talk to you guys briefly about the link development strategies outreach spreadsheet that we put together. This is actually an inspiration from Jon Cooper over at Point Blank SEO. He’s kind of awesome. He’s 18 years old and the kid’s kicking ass. He’s probably one of the leading experts at link development at this point with his blog that’s only been around for a year. It’s kind of killer. He put together this list of almost 200 different link building strategies. I saw the list thought it was super useful.

At the time, I was also putting together my presentation for Distilled’s LinkLove conference over in Boston and we’ve been really big on processes over at Outspoken Media lately and trying to figure out how do we hone in on processes that are going to deliver a big return for our clients and help us become more profitable as well as our clients.

So we’ve been really putting together a lot of process maps and checklists and so I took a look at Jon’s list and said this is fantastic, there’s so many things in here, but how do we make it a little more searchable and actionable?

So, what I did with the help of our team, Joseph Schaefer was outstanding, he helped me knock out about half this list. Emily Cote, she helped as well. Michelle helped proof everything and Danika helped look it over. So, you guys are awesome and couldn’t have done it without you.

The whole team and myself worked on this and said let’s attach timeframes and dependencies. The point of the timeframes is that with link building (and this was the whole meat of the presentation I gave at LinkLove), you have to have a calendar and what that calendar does is defines when are you going to start publishing a campaign? Does that campaign need to get started three months in advance of when you need to really have the value of your links helping you because of black friday, or maybe back to school or the swimwear season has started?

Whatever your industry-specific calendars are, internal calendars or priorities. Your calendar defines all of that, but with link building we know that links don’t necessarily accrue value immediately and that your results are going to come a little bit slower. So with that in mind is what we did was put together timeframes it would take to get a campaign started so that you might be able to implement certain links in a manner of minutes.

Other links might be campaigns that take three months or more. In addition to that we added dependencies so within your organization, especially enterprise level organizations, you’re going to have different departments that you need to go to. If you’re doing a contest, you need to get legal involved and have that writing really solid. You probably want PR involved. Your social media team. There might be some content creation needed. Marketing might need to get involved. You might need your designers to create something. The development team might have to code something.

So we wanted to say, who would you probably need to go to for that approval process that way you can work it into your calendar as well. And then, the third thing that we did was we added value. Kind of in our mind, the perception of the value that you would get from that link building method. Those values range from low to low to moderate to moderate to moderate to high and then to high. And the idea here is that now you have this awesome spreadsheet where you can see the link building method thanks to Jon.

And then with our timeframes and dependencies and values, you might be able to customize that for your own internal processes and say, ok I’ve got one month before I need to get results what are the most high value methods that I can go after? That don’t maybe require approvals from a certain department because of internal politics or you just know you’re not going to get approvals for one reason or another. Maybe there’s a code freeze on the development side. Whatever the difficulty is that you’re facing.

So, we want to give you something that you can very quickly search, hone in on what methods you can achieve, and that’s going to give you a lot of inspiration and hopefully allow you to move on from there.

So we came up with this idea, we put the spreadsheet together, we sent it out to a lot of the LinkLove attendees last week and thank you guys for all of the feedback and support on it. And what we were astounded by was the reception. And actually I actually have someone who contacted us and said that they then turned this into an HTML format with filtering which is awesome. So, we are just ecstatic to see how this idea is growing from Jon to us and us to Alex and they’ll be releasing that later on today.

So, stay tuned for the next evolution of this and on our end, what we like about the spreadsheet is again that you can download that yourself and you can customize that for your internal processes and we hope that you do that and you see amazing success with your future link building campaigns. Let us know how it goes and if you have any questions or concerns with the spreadsheet, again, let us know.

A lot of that was kind of averages based on our past experience, but everything is going to be different, not apples to apples with each site and each industry. So, happy hunting with your links! Thanks. Bye.

This is great. This is the beauty of our SEO industry. I don’t believe any other industry in this world would share such a valuable piece of documents (I can see how many hours of some great SEOer’s spend here). Good on you guys, this sort of post encourage other people to do something similar for the industry.

Wow Rhea, just came across your site and an incredible resource from Jon and great value added by yourself to this project. The list of link building methods is amazing, never thought of many of the ideas presented. Well done to you both.

Thanks for posting this Rhea. I’m sure, newbies in the field as well as experts will be happy to have this spreadsheet. Personally, it is very to me because I work in the industry. Not too many people share their secrets online and I commemorate you for doing so.

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